Josh Stuart, a researcher and associate professor at UC Santa Cruz, has developed new tools to analyze cancer data and will be featured on a prime time telecast ?Stand Up To Cancer? that will air on Sept. 7.

SANTA CRUZ - Hollywood celebrities will take the stage at 7 p.m. Friday for an hourlong Stand Up to Cancer telethon, showing their support for research to find better treatments, some of which is taking place at UC Santa Cruz.

Since being founded in 2008, Stand Up To Cancer has raised more than $180 million to research and funding seven multi-disciplinary "Dream Teams" of researchers to focus on a disease that is the No. 2 cause of death among Americans.

David Haussler, UCSC computer scientist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, is one of 11 principal researchers awarded a three-year grant for $16.5 million. This project, led by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UCLA, involves studying three subtypes of breast cancer to understand how they become resistant to drugs.

Haussler has tapped Josh Stuart, an associate professor of biomolecular engineering at UCSC, as the lead researcher in Santa Cruz.

Stuart, 40, married and the father of two children, taught himself computer programming in high school and became fascinated by microbiology in college. He majored in computer science and molecular biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where genome scientist Gary Stormo was a mentor, then earned a doctorate at Stanford.

He came to Santa Cruz lured by the prospect of working with Haussler, whom he calls "Mr. Genome," but he brings a personal interest as well. His mother is a cancer survivor.

Researchers have been analyzing 20 different cancers, 500 patients each, with Stuart co-leader of a group looking for commonalities.

"What can we learn from breast cancer and apply it to prostate cancer?" he asked.

About 20 percent of the breast cancer cases, he said, look like lung cancer. Others look like a subset of ovarian cancer or endometrial cancer. So perhaps drugs being used to treat one type of cancer might be successful in treating another type.

"It's not too futuristic," Stuart said.

"We have to understand cell biology to understand cancer," he said.

For example, the antibody herceptin, used to treat one type of breast cancer, stops or slows the growth of cancer cells. But often it works only for several months, maybe a year, then the cancer adapts, the tumor spreads and the patient dies.

So the focus on finding ways to co-target the growth receptors and the resistant tumors and deliver a one-two punch.

"We've got to have the cocktail so they don't evolve," Stuart said.

At times, Stuart said he feels like a detective studying the scene of an accident.

"Each cancer is a different case," he said. "Some are harder to figure out. We just see the digital data, we never see the patients."

He sees a need to connect researchers so they can learn more from each other - and faster.

The standard procedure is to write a research paper, but getting it reviewed and published in a journal can take a year.

Stuart, who traveled to Texas this week to talk about the work at UCSC, envisions a new model, perhaps something like tweeting, to create a "rapid learning community" and bringing together scientists, doctors and patients.

He's not the only one.

Ted Goldstein, a former Apple executive and UCSC alum, has returned to campus to earn a doctorate in biomolecular engineering. His ideas is to create a "Facebook" for cancer, with algorithms analyzing cancer mutations so treatments could be tailored for patients.